Storage Bits

December 30th, 2009

Blu-ray's special Xmas gift: no 3D for you!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 6:45 am

Categories: Infrastructure, Marketing

Tags: 3D, Blu-ray Disc, Sales, Blu-Ray, DVD, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Home Entertainment, Robin Harris

The Blu-ray Disk Association (BDA) announced last week that your brand new Blu-ray player is already obsolete: it is incompatible with the new 3D Blu-ray spec.

Should you care?

Cash cow or albatross?
The hurried adoption of 3D - a costly new medium with a 0.000% share of the home market - smells of desperation. Once the novelty wears off, will the hassle and expense of special glasses, a new HD3D TV and a player attract a mass audience that still hasn’t bought into Blu-ray?

Quick answer: nope.

Blu-ray reality check
Back on Planet Earth, how is Blu-ray doing? Not so well, but thank you for asking.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 2 years after Blu-ray “won” the HD format war:

. . . the take from Blu-ray has been underwhelming. The high-definition home-video format, now four years old, will produce . . . 14 percent of anticipated sales of regular DVDs this year, and half what the older format produced in its fourth year, in 2000.

[bolding added]

And since Blu-ray disks cost more than DVDs, 14% way overstates the unit sales percentage. Most Blu-ray sales are new movies at high prices, while the DVD market includes many sales at $10 or less.

Dreaming of a Blu Christmas
Low prices - lower than DVD players were at the 4 year mark - are spurring player sales this year. Wal-Mart offers an $80 player - an easy impulse buy.

The low prices are working. Another WSJ article (subscription may be required) notes that Blu-ray player sales are up 54% this year, but with a twist:

. . . shoppers are also flocking to models that cost a bit more, . . . for their ability to stream content from the Internet, including movies, television shows and music from services like Netflix Inc., Google Inc.’s YouTube and Pandora Media Inc.

The question for Hollywood is: will people load up on Blu-ray disks in the middle of a Great Recession when online content is so much more convenient?

The Storage Bits take
I have a nifty home theater - 10 foot HD screen, 5.1 surround sound, Blu-ray player, leather recliners - and many visitors. Blu-ray’s sharper picture is only rarely noticed: people get involved with a story, not a picture.

While I’d like Blu-ray to be a success, and I prefer physical media, Hollywood can’t count on Blu-ray, even 3D Blu-ray, to reignite disk sales. The landscape has changed permanently.

• Competition for viewer attention is much higher, thanks to all the distractions on the Internet. That will only increase.
• 3D has a chance in theaters, assuming the issues of viewer headaches and dorky glasses are overcome.
• The brewing “format war” in home 3D delivery systems will slow adoption just as much as the lack of 3D content will.
• The early popularity of networked download appliances is a warning to home media server vendors: you’ve fallen way short of meeting home market needs. I’m looking at you, Apple TV.

Hollywood’s best hope is a ringtone strategy: encourage consumers to regard media as disposable fashion, not “content.” Low prices and multiple download/player formats will let consumers buy and enjoy without counting pennies - or crying too much when they lose copies.

The bits are free, after all. And the competition is fierce. The multi-billion dollar ringtone market is a model, not a mistake.

Comments welcome, of course. PS3 owners, don’t worry: you are compatible with the new 3D spec. A personal supercomputer has its advantages.

December 20th, 2009

Are you ready for 4k sector drives?

Posted by Robin Harris @ 6:53 pm

Categories: Disk drives

Tags: Disk, Sector, WD, Emulation Mode, Microsoft Windows XP, Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software, Robin Harris

WD has started shipping drives that drop the ancient 512 byte disk sector for a 4096 byte - 4k - sector. What’s in it for you? And what will it do to you?

Disks write your data in fixed chunks. For several decades those chunks have been almost always been 512 byte sectors (some vendors have played with other sizes - such as 520 bytes - and irritated their customers no end). But the industry is beginning to phase in a 4k block. Here’s what you need to know.

Today’s sectors look like this:

courtesy Western Digital

Why?
Rising bit density means smaller magnetic areas and more noise. The underlying or raw disk media error rate is approaching 1 error in every thousand bits on average - while tiny media defects can lose hundreds of bytes in a row. The larger sectors make it easier to fix those gaps.

The raw error rate is cleaned up by the sector error correcting code (ECC) and sophisticated signal processing to reach a SATA drive’s specified error rate of 1 in 10¹⁴. The magnetic spots are smaller than 45nm transistors and they’re spinning 120 times a second. Without robust ECC disk storage wouldn’t work.

Why now?
A 512 byte sector can’t support enough ECC to correct for increasing raw error rates. Thus bigger sectors with stronger ECC capable of detecting and correcting much larger errors - up to 400 bytes on a 4k sector.

Here’s a diagram of the 4k sector. Less protocol overhead and better ECC.

courtesy Western Digital

Note: the longer ECC doesn’t change the drive level read error rate. It remains at 1 unrecoverable read error about every 12.5 TB.

Is this new?
4k sectors have been cooking for over a decade. Drive vendors started by convincing Microsoft and other OS and BIOS vendors of the problem years ago.

The late adopters are the cloning software vendors. More on that in a moment.

Why should I care?
Would you like a 4 TB disk? 8 TB?

The 4k sector enables disk manufacturers to keep cramming more bits on a disk. Without them the annual 40% capacity increases we’ve come to expect would stop.

What about performance?
Marginal, invisible-to-the-naked-eye improvements. But it won’t be worse, either.

Will 4k sectors use capacity faster?
If you write 500 bytes and the minimum sector is 4k, will that write take up the full 4k, wasting 3.5 KB? No.

The initial WD drives - and I assume other vendors as well - will operate in a 512 byte emulation mode. Eventually new disks will operate in native 4k mode, and then you might have a concern. But many operating systems already do 4k IO, and at a couple of cents per future GB, who cares?

The emulation mode puts 8 512 byte writes into a single 4k sector. There is no loss at all. Here’s a picture:

courtesy Western Digital

Gotchas?
If you are in either of these 2 groups:

1. Windows XP users
2. Windows users who clone disks with software like Norton Ghost

there are a couple of gotchas if you want to use a 4k drive. Since most drives aren’t 4k and won’t be for another year or more, this may not affect you either. Vista and W7 users are cool except for cloning.

1) Windows XP does not automatically align writes on 4k boundaries, which hurts performance. WD has software - the Advanced Format Align Utility for their drives. I assume other vendors will too when they start shipping.

XP users need to run this utility once to use a 4k drive with a clean install, cloning software or a do-it-yourself USB drive. WD-branded 4k USB drives are already aligned so it isn’t needed for those drives.

2) Windows clone software vendors have yet to implement 4k support. If you clone an XP, Vista or W7 drive you should run the align utility. The cloning vendors need to get on board Real Soon Now. Vendors are welcome to comment on their plans.

What about Macs?
No worries: Mac OS just works with 4k drives - including cloning.

How can I recognize a 4k drive?
WD is labeling theirs and I assume other vendors will follow suit. Here’s WD’s label:

The Storage Bits take
There’s been a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes to make this transition as smooth as possible. With Vista, W7, Mac OS and Linux support well in hand most users won’t notice any change.

XP users have a bit more to be aware of and some will get bit by performance issues. The easiest solution for XP users: avoid installing 4k drives. Factory installed XP will be fine.

My question: why not a better read-error spec? Today’s large SATA drives shouldn’t be used in 4 drive RAID 5 arrays due to the high likelihood of a read error after a drive failure, which will abort the RAID rebuild. A better error spec would fix this.

Comments welcome, of course. WD’s dynamic Heather Skinner arranged my briefing. No sectors, old or new, changed hands.

December 14th, 2009

Why the Air Force wants 2200 more PlayStations

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:13 pm

Categories: Clusters, Infrastructure

Tags: Sony PlayStation 3, Air Force, Sony Playstation, GPGPU, Processors, Servers, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Robin Harris

The US Air Force Research Laboratory has put out a request for 2200 PS3s for supercomputing applications. Just in time for Christmas.

Scientists realized years ago that the PS3 Cell processor packs a lot of computer power at a very low cost.

The PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor, or Cell, is a heterogenous multiprocessor. Instead of identical cores - like Intel and AMD multi-core processors - the Cell consists of a 64 bit PowerPC core and 8 “synergistic co-processor elements” (SPEs).

Each SPE has 256 KB local store, a memory controller and a “synergistic processing unit” (SPU) with a Single Instruction, Multiple Data processing unit and 128 registers of 128 bits each. They’re connected by a bus with an internal bandwidth of more than 300 GB/s that transfers data between the SPEs.

The Air Force isn’t going to play Halo Uncharted 2 on them.

The new PS3s will be placed in a cluster environment with an existing cluster of 336 PS3s by connecting each of the units’ one gigabit Ethernet port to a common 24 port gigabit hub. Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software.

Only the PS3?
The Feds have rules about sole-sourcing, so the Justification Review Document explains why only PS3s are acceptable:

With respect to cell processors, a single 1U server configured with two 3.2GHz cell processors can cost up to $8K while two Sony PS3s cost approximately $600. Though a single 3.2 GHz cell processor can deliver over 200 GFLOPS, whereas the Sony PS3 configuration delivers approximately 150 GFLOPS, the approximately tenfold cost difference per GFLOP makes the Sony PS3 the only viable technology for HPC applications.

What about Intel?
The Air Force also looked at Intel:

. . . optimized performance on Xeon processors was explored through collaborative work with the Space Situational Awareness Institute at MHPCC. This work involved a detailed study of Xeon multithreading and SSE4 optimization on image processing intensive tasks. The subcluster headnodes are dual-quad Xeon servers. While these servers were found to be technically capable, they preclude a 500 TFlop/s system and their cost is more than an order of magnitude greater than the PS3 technology, thereby not fulfilling DHPI’s research needs.

Well, that settles it.

Update: A commenter reminded me that last year’s World’s Fastest Computer used a of lot of Cell CPUs. See more at PS3 chip powers world’s fastest computer. End update.

What about GPUs?
Graphics processing units (GPU) are the other hot parallel processing technology. And the Air Force looked at them too:

In the head-to-head competition between GPGPUs and Cell BEs, the cost of the host for the GPGPU was a significant factor. However, in this architecture, the subcluster headnodes are already provided, so the incremental GPGPU cost is attractive, even in comparison to PS3s. The GPGPUs have the additional advantage of not adding to the system size. . . . Our assessment is that the GPGPUs will accelerate a subset of our algorithms, particularly the frontend processing and backend visualization, but lag the PS3 in the bulk of the calculations where processes need to intercommunicate and share memory beyond what is supported efficiently by the GPGPUs.

In other words, GPUs are a good deal if you don’t have to buy a computer to put them in. Which the Air Force didn’t.

What do they do with them?
I’m not sure the following answers the question, but it was the best I found:

The cell processor has shown large performance advantages for several applications, including Back Projection Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Imager formation, High Definition Video image processing, and Neuromorphic Computing.

I Googled “neuromorphic computing” so you wouldn’t have to. Wikipedia says

The term neuromorphic was coined by Carver Mead in the late 1980s to describe very-large-scale integration (VLSI) systems containing electronic analog circuits that mimic neuro-biological architectures present in the nervous system. In recent times the term neuromorphic has been used to describe both analog, digital or mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI systems that implement models of neural systems (for perception, motor control, or sensory processing) as well as software algorithms.

If I read that right a PS3 may be flying a real airplane someday. Uh-oh: Skynet!

The Storage Bits take
The PS3 may be a close 3rd in the game console wars, but it is first in the hearts of high performance computing geeks. They’ve even published a do it yourself guide to build your own PS3 supercomputing cluster.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to get a PS3, this could be it: “Honey, it’s to improve my situational awareness - just like the Air Force!”

Comments welcome, of course. No, Sony has not sent me a review copy of the PS3. Maybe they’re angry about my Blu-ray is dead posts? And Kudos to the AFRL for carefully managing the taxpayer’s dollars. Also, credit to the Escapist where I first saw this story.

December 13th, 2009

Linux kicks Microsoft back

Posted by Robin Harris @ 7:13 pm

Categories: Marketing, Software

Tags: Dell Computer Corp., Mobile, ABI Research, Microsoft Corp., CEO, Linux, UNIX, Operating Systems, Open Source, Software

Bucking the conventional wisdom and Microsoft press releases, ABI Research says that Linux has a 32% share of the netbook market - and predicts Linux will overtake Windows by 2013. Microsoft says “. . . over 93% of worldwide small notebook PCs run Windows today.” They can’t both be right.

Credibility?
Microsoft is, of course, the world’s largest software company. Other than a conviction for illegal anti-trust activity against Netscape - a conviction unanimously confirmed on appeal - and over $10 billion in settlements for anti-trust and patent infringement claims, they are clean.

ABI Research has been in business for 19 years. Senior analyst Jeff Orr joined them last year. ABI is an established firm.

Dell chimes in
Further, after I published Windows kicks Linux to the curb last January, Dell said 1/3rd of Mini 9s sold run Linux. And Dell later said the return rate wasn’t any higher than XP’s.

Analyst Orr stresses that a lot of the Linux activity is outside the US, where people are less locked into Windows. And he also conscientiously does not include dual-boot systems - Linux only systems, please.

So who’s telling the truth?
Microsofties have a special problem: their CEO, Steve Ballmer. He of the chair-throwing hissy fits. The “ha-ha, stomp your iPhone” CEO.

The one who claimed a 60% mobile market share when independent analysts said 14%. Steve Ballmer may be a fine fellow - he could be a warm and caring human being with bad press - he just doesn’t want to hear bad news.

Why bad news is good news
“Management by exception” (MBE) is a popular management model that says look at things that aren’t performing as expected. But for MBE to work, someone has to tell the CEO the bad news.

Then the CEO can figure out what the problem is - maybe the CEO was wrong about something - and then fix it. Microsoft has had enough problems in the last 10 years to practice on.

But at Microsoft, it seems few people tell the CEO bad news. Of course, facts are facts, so spinning to make them OK is a corporate survival strategy.

The Storage Bits take
I don’t think Microsoft is deliberately lying. They just see the world differently than you and the analysts do.

Here’s what’s happening. People in the trenches knew, for example, that the Mini 9 business was 1/3rd Linux. Windows marketing knew because Dell is a big customer.

So, do you tell the boss that you’ve screwed up and Linux is gaining share at one of the world’s largest PC vendors? Nah, that’s for losers.

Instead, through the magic of market segmentation, you pull Dell’s Linux numbers out of the “small PC” market and put them in some other market - mobile Internet devices, say - until you get to the preferred “93% share” number. And you mention that you’ve “heard” that Linux returns are a lot higher, i.e. Linux isn’t competitive.

Mission accomplished. Now, you’re sucking wind in the mobile Internet device catagory, but that’s not your problem - Windows 7 Mobile will fix it - or not. Meanwhile you’ve lived to fight another day.

Comments welcome, of course. I spent over 20 years in big companies and yes, stuff like this really happens. Update: A year ago I believed Microsoft’s numbers. Today, not so much.End update.

December 8th, 2009

RFID passport identity theft made simple

Posted by Robin Harris @ 11:20 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: Passport, Identity Theft, RFID Passport, RFID, Wireless And Mobility, Security, Biometrics, Robin Harris

You’re confident your RFID passport is safe in its signal-blocking wallet as you pass through immigration. What you don’t know is that the man behind you is recording the data sent by your passport’s RFID chip as it is scanned.

Your name, nationality, gender, birthday, birthplace and a nicely digitized photo is in his hands. With that info he can photoshop up a passport, get a copy of your Social Security card and with that get credit cards and bank accounts in your name.

Rewarding individual enterprise
Thanks to bureaucratic confidence in RFID technology this is a real threat. An article in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery goes into the details:

For successful data retrieval the perpetrator’s antenna must catch two different interactions: the forward channel, which is the signal being sent from the RFID reader to the RFID token; and the backward channel, which is the data being sent back from the RFID token to the RFID reader. . . .

. . . the perpetrator would need only an antenna and an amplifier to boost the signal capture, a radio-frequency mixer and filter, and a computer to store the data. The amplifier itself would not even need to be that powerful, since it would need to boost the signal over only a short distance of three to five meters. . . . These RFID “sniffers” can then be plugged into a laptop via a USB port.

They’ve got your data, now what?
The weak 52-bit key encryption is easily broken. Then just counterfeit the passport, get a social security card and start shopping!

As the article notes, forging a passport can be expensive. It might be easier just to steal it.

The Storage Bits take
The RFIDiocy keeps getting worse. The Feds were pwnd at DefCon earlier this year.

But these are just the risks we know about today. What new technologies will appear in the next 15 years to make both eavesdropping and forgery easier?

The RFID passport is a technological sitting duck for bad guys of all kinds - criminals and terrorists - courtesy of the US State Department.

As I noted in previous post:

The time to end this nonsense is now. There are perfectly usable non-RF storage technologies - like 3D barcodes - that can safely store data in hard to crack, hard to hack formats.

We can do better. And we must.

Comments welcome, of course.

December 6th, 2009

The last word on Swoopo

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:54 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags:

I’ve had some more back channel conversations with Howard Hartenbaum, the VC partner who invested $10 million in Swoopo. Here’s his unedited response to my posts on Swoopo:

Robin,
Hey, nice post. Now that you’ve spent $24 on Swoopo, I am glad to see that you have some strong opinions. I’m guessing that the first book you bought on Amazon when it was a fledgling service cost $24 and you didn’t like the book, so you wrote a scathing article how “Amazon’s business is doomed to fail because they sell terrible books.”

In Amazon’s early days, there were also naysayers. Swoopo is simply something new. You haven’t seen something like it before, so you are skeptical, which I applaud. But you need to look closer into the details. In your article you clearly state someone won a Nikon D90 for $1.33. Then you complain when the list price is $1,339 (and you leave out that the $1,330 price includes 150 bids worth $90). Sure, $1,240 isn’t the lowest price on the web. If you want the lowest price guaranteed, then go to B&H. If you want to try to get it for $1.33 and have some fun in the process, then go to Swoopo.

You claim that Swoopo is “insanely profitable” and you liken it to Wall Street. Your quick analysis of the business leaves out some key facts such as Swoopo loses money on a majority of its auctions – you pointed out a Nikon D90 for $1.33. Was that profitable for Swoopo? I’ve seen a 42″ TV go for $0.66. I’m sure the winners of those auctions are really happy Swoopo customers, just like Nick Marchevsky.

Swoopo takes a lot of risk on each auction and needs to get ten’s of bidders concurrently to each auction to make it break even. That costs a lot of money. How much does eBay pay for a new registered user? Multiply that number by 35 to see what our customer acquisition costs are to satisfy just one auction.

Most importantly, if you don’t win at Swoopo, you can buy the item at a discount equal to your bidding cost. You left out this very important point in your article. There is no risk to trying Swoopo.

You also tell me how to be a good venture capitalist. Nobody would argue that Skype isn’t now one of the world’s greatest companies, providing free telephony and improving communication throughout the world. Well, I was fortunate enough to meet the founders and finance their business, even though many other investors decided against it because it was “controversial” and “risky.” If Skype didn’t receive early financing, perhaps it wouldn’t be around today, employing hundreds of people and providing a service to hundreds of millions.

And to answer your question: Yes, I became a venture capitalist to find exciting, innovative, creative and fun companies like Swoopo. My bet is that a few years from now when they have worked out the details, Swoopo will be a world class company that lives up to it’s name “Entertainment Shopping.” It has a long way to go, but it is young and working on it.

Best,
Howard

The Storage Bits take
Looks like Howard and I will have to agree to disagree. There are ethical and marketing issues that I believe will, over time, cause consumers to sour on this model - just as they have on Ebay’s straightforward auctions.

An unemployed young man who spends up to two hours in each auction and has, on occasion, spent more money in a winning effort than the item itself would have cost is not a great example for Swoopo.

But I appreciate your hanging in there, Howard. Best of luck on all your ventures.

ZDnet readers: what say you?

November 30th, 2009

A chump's game? Swoopo VC responds

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:21 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Journalist, Capitalism, Capitalist, Board, Swoopo VC, Board Member, Chump, August Capital, Corporate Governance, Venture Capital

At least, I think one did.

I got an email from someone identifying himself as Howard, a Swoopo board member, taking issue with yesterday’s post. His note, in full:

Hi Robin,

It appears you didn’t finish your research on Swoopo before writing your article. If you lose an auction, you can apply all lost bids towards purchasing. Yes, it is hard to win. But it is impossible to lose. I would appreciate if you’d update your article to reflect the facts, which would be good journalism. Thanks,
Howard (Swoopo board member)

The venture capital firm August Capital web site lists a Howard Hartenbaum as a partner. Howard was a founding investor in Skype and an MIT graduate, so he didn’t just fall off a Gilroy garlic truck.

It was a nicer note than some I’ve received, so assuming I’ve got the right Howard, I’m sending a response.

Dear Howard,

Thanks for taking the time to comment. But let me clear one thing up: I’m not a bad journalist. I’m a good capitalist, with a Wharton MBA and a business.

Since you presumed to tell me my business as a journalist, let me return the favor in the spirit of what diplomats call “full and frank” discussion.

I like being a capitalist and running my own business. And I hate it when bozos make capitalism look bad.

The word “capitalism” appears nowhere in the US Constitution. In a democracy, capitalism needs a good reputation to maintain public support. Swoopo doesn’t help.

Capitalism’s basis - greed - is a moral problem, as Adam Smith acknowledged in The Wealth of Nations. He argued that capitalists may be greedy and amoral, but the “invisible hand” of the marketplace makes them improve the lives of others nonetheless.

That’s great when it works. But Wall Street’s greed - and the lack of responsible supervision - led to the gross irresponsibility and dereliction that caused our Great Recession.

Capitalism’s excesses can overwhelm the goods. What Swoopo is doing may not be illegal - just as Goldman Sachs betting against the toxic securities they sold wasn’t - but it smells. And that is bad for capitalism.

The fig leaf
Your fig leaf argument for Swoopo - lost bids can be applied to the purchase price - has a big hole in it: Swoopo’s prices are well above their claimed “Internet deals” prices.

For example, the Nikon D90 that I bid on was listed on Swoopo at $1339, is available from the excellent B&H Photo for $1149.95, while the reputable PC Connection offers it for $1099.95.

Out of 52 vendors found on Google only 3 list the D90 at a higher price than Swoopo does - and one was out of stock.

Would netizens shop Swoopo at those prices? No, the come-on is the potential for good deals.

Only the deals are - as you note - hard to win. Very hard to win.

I’ve followed one “auction” that has lasted over 12 hours. It keeps resetting to 60-90 minute waits. Great way to get a fresh batch of “bidders” in the door.

A chump’s game
Glen Whitney, a mathematician and former quant at pioneer hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, told the New York Times that with Swoopo:

Unless you have an edge over other people who are bidding, and you can get them to subsidize your purchase, you shouldn’t do it. It’s a chump’s game.

Howard, what say you? You are an MIT grad and can do the math. Do you encourage your family to bid on Swoopo?

As a board member you see the numbers. You know how Swoopo works, how insanely profitable it is, how it preys on bad judgement. Is funding a company like Swoopo why you became a Valley venture capitalist?

Separating fools - or, in my case, the momentarily bored - from their money is an ancient occupation. So is 3 card monte. That doesn’t make it right.

I hope you’ll reconsider your support for Swoopo. August Capital funds many promising companies, but Swoopo isn’t one of them. Please do not demean the good name of venture capital and August Capital with investments of this sort.

Sincerely,

Robin Harris
President
TechnoQWAN LLC

The Storage Bits take
Call me an idealist, but I chose to work in technology rather than investment banking. There is true innovation in technology, not the Ponzi schemes, financial engineering and regulation-skirting that passes for innovation on Wall Street.

Can you name one real innovation on Wall Street in the last 25 years? Overdraft protection? Sub-prime loans? That’s it.

Many of my classmates made a different decision and I don’t judge them. “Time and chance happen to all men” as the good book says. But August Capital has a chance to lead Silicon Valley away from lucrative but exploitative businesses.

I hope they’ll take it. And leave the rest to Wall Street.

Comments welcome, of course. Folks, please stop calling me a journalist. It bums out the real journalists at ZDnet who’ve worked a beat for years, learning their craft. I’m not cut out for it.

November 29th, 2009

Swoopo: a lottery disguised as an auction?

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:14 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Bid, Auction, Chump, Robin Harris

Here’s a good web business: sell products for 3x retail - and have people pay for the privilege. Cool!

The bad news: someone already thought of it. How do they get people - including me - to sign up for such a bad deal?

I’ve blown an afternoon and $24 learning about online scam “Entertainment Shopping” site Swoopo. Think “Las Vegas-style Wal-Mart” - you can’t win.

A chump’s game
The site is alluring: high-end products like digital SLRs, notebooks, appliances, TVs and mp3 players with awesome auction prices. Like a 64GB iPod touch for $157.68 or a Nikon D90 for $1.33.

How can you lose? Easy.

The trick is that Swoopo sells bids for $0.60 each. Each bid increments the price by a few cents - sometimes as little as 1 cent on valuable items like a Canon DSLR.

To make it more exciting, there is a clock ticking down. Bid when it reaches 00:01 and you could be the lucky winner. But everyone else has the same idea - and each bid causes the clock to reset for at least 10 seconds and sometimes much longer.

So you sit and you click and you sit some more.

The math
Let’s say a $800 Canon DSLR sells for $100 with 1 cent increments. That means ~10,000 bids were offered at a total cost to the bidders of more than $6,000.

That could be a great deal - if you win - but that $6,000 came from you and people like you. And what if you spent $500 on bids to win?

That’s like betting $500 to win $800 - at the risk of losing it all. A chump’s game.

Update: but wait! There’s more! I left 2 auctions open and this morning they had both frozen with 00:20 seconds to go. The D90 site only had 2 bidders, but when I hit reload the servers were down. If you get mad when your free Gmail goes down, you’ll love Swoopo. End update.

The Storage Bits take
Humans aren’t good at judging risk - which is why people don’t back up their data. Swoopo makes their site look like an auction, but because you pay to bid it is more like a lottery.

Like weight loss ads on TV - “results not typical” - Swoopo and sites like it need truth in labeling. “You are highly likely to lose more money than you might save” would be a good start.

Do yourself a favor: stay away!

Comments welcome, of course. I bought my bids with my own money and even if I do happen to win an auction the fundamentals remain the same.

November 23rd, 2009

Light Peak: black hole

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:14 am

Categories: Infrastructure

Tags: Black Hole, Sony Corp., I/O, Apple Inc., USB, Intel Corp., USB 3.0, Cable, Telecommunications, Personal Technology

Light Peak is a high-speed optical I/O interconnect - starting at 10 Gbit/sec and scaling to 100 - whose parents are 3 of the biggest I/0 screwups in high tech: Sony, Apple and Intel. Can you spell doomed?

And that is too bad for us, because Light Peak - or something like it - is a Very Good Thing.

The need
The Moore’s Law driven merry-go-round of CPU, storage and bandwidth growth needs to get another push - this time with bandwidth. USB 3.0 claims a 5 Gbit/sec bandwidth - like USB 2.0 claims 480 Mbit/sec, HA! - but leading edge consumers are already using that with eSATA.

For these folks USB 3.0 is too little, too late.

But USB 3.0 faces a bigger problem: stricter EMI regulations. The 1 GHz and above band has been lightly regulated but as more services - Wifi and more - move into that range standards groups are clamping down.

Each USB 3.0 cable and port is a gigahertz radio broadcasting in your living room. The cables can be shielded by the emission problems will only get worse with time as devices proliferate.

That’s where Light Peak comes in. An optical interconnect cable doesn’t radiate EMI. It’s immune to problems like ground loops that can afflict copper cables. High-speed optical interconnects are cleaner.

Every interconnect takes up device space and power, requires driver updates and leaves customers with the limitations of older technology. Yet the longer a popular interconnect is shipping the better the drivers can be tuned for both reliability and performance.

The players
Intel, Sony and Apple hope to make Light Peak a universal optical interconnect. Intel has been driving hard to reduce the cost of the optical transceivers and they have made tremendous progress. Apple wants to limit the number of interconnects on its systems. And Sony and the rest of Hollywood dream of a consumer paradise where we spend all day watching carefully DRM’d 3D super high def video on an array of costly displays, speakers and servers.

And everyone wants a physically small and fast I/O port for mobile devices.

Sadly, none of them get I/O.

• Apple. Arguably the worst offender, Apple’s penchant for tiny I/O ports - mini-VGA, mini-DVI, mini-DisplayPort and the ghastly ADC - has inflicted more pain on Mac users than even FireWire’s high license fees.
• Intel. Who remembers that Intel pushed Infiniband to replace PCI? Great I/O tech with no sense of market realities like cost.
• Sony. They’ve pooched Blu-ray. Last consumer hits: PS2, Walkman and Trinitron. And they love DRM.

Intel claims all Light Peak components will ship next year. But they need a launch customer, preferably one with a large following among bandwidth intensive users such as scientists and video pros. Apple fits the bill.

The consumer wild card
Consumer acceptance - even from Apple fans - is not a given. One big issue: the cost of critical bits like hubs, disk interfaces and cables.

When USB was new the extra bits were costly too. The key is how fast Intel can drive optical chip prices down. They tend to be way optimistic - so I’m not.

The Storage Bits take
Light Peak is a great idea and doomed. Between obnoxious DRM, costly optical hubs and switches, Blu-ray style licensing fees, Intel over-engineering and Apple’s penchant for twee little I/O ports, Light Peak is almost certain to come to fail.

Which is too bad. USB2 shows the value and power of a mature general purpose interconnect. Plug in a thumb drive, digital camera, media player, disk drive, scanner, printer, hub or rocket launcher - and they just work.

That takes years, so an interconnect designed to scale to 100 Gbits/sec as Moore’s Law drives down interface costs is a Very Good Thing. Let’s hope our corporate overlords surprise us this once.

Comments welcome, of course. How about giving thanks this week for driver writers whose hard work is among the least appreciated in all of techdom?

November 18th, 2009

Disks: why size means performance

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:41 am

Categories: Disk drives, Solid State Disk

Tags: Hard Drive, Disk, Performance, Solid State Disk, Robin Harris

Big=fast
Most people keep less than 80 GB of data, including the operating system and their applications, on their hard drive. So why should they buy a 500 GB, 1 or even 2 TB hard drive?

One simple reason: speed. That big hard drive will give you this snappiest performance this side of a solid-state disk.

For many applications, even faster than a costly SSD. For a lot less money.

Why?

Big circles, little circles
Data is laid on disks in blocks called sectors. The sectors are laid down in circular tracks.

Disk engineers saw a long time ago that they could put more sectors on the outside of a disk than on the inside. As the head gets closer to the center of the disk, there are fewer sectors - and your data rate slows down.

How much? The innermost track will commonly have only ~45% of the speed of the outermost track.

But that’s not all
Bigger hard drives have another advantage: higher bit density. So for the same RPM, more bits come out.

The difference is substantial. A 3.5″ 500 GB drive might max out at 80 MB/sec, while a 1 TB drive will reach 100 MB/sec. The new 2 TB drives can reach 140 MB/sec.

1 more thing
Not only do big drives deliver more bandwidth, they also deliver more I/Os per second (IOPS). On a half full drive the head will never have to move across the entire platter to access data, cutting seek times - all else being equal - in half.

Big million dollar enterprise RAID arrays stuffed with 15k drives frequently short stroke their already-fast drives to make them even faster. It works on home systems too.

What about SSDs?
Flash-based solid state disks (SSD) excel at random reads - which is why they boot up a system so much faster than a hard drive. But due to the housekeeping needed to make an SSD look like a hard drive their write performance isn’t nearly as stellar.

A state-of-the-consumer-art SSD, the 80 GB Intel X25-M G2, is spec’d (pdf) at 70 MB/sec for sustained sequential writes.

A 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 rpm notebook drive will average almost 80 MB/sec while offering 6x the capacity for a much lower cost.

If you work with large files - photography, music, video - you’ll notice the difference over an SSD.

The Storage Bits take
Installing a big hard drive is, after more RAM, the easiest performance upgrade most of us can make. Even if you don’t need the capacity you’ll appreciate a friskier computer.

Another benefit: after initial break-in, new hard drives tend to be much more reliable than a 3 year old drive. Faster, more reliable and cheaper than an SSD, a hard drive upgrade may be all you need to keep your system happy.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. For more on this topic see Hard disks do get slower with use.